In the early morning hours Thursday, a band of powerful storms hovered over SECO Energy’s service area. The storms brought soaking rain, lightning, high winds and a tornado warning in our territory.

SECO is “Storm Ready” and was well prepared for the overnight storm. All SECO locations were fully staffed by 2:00 a.m. on Thursday morning with the company’s Operations crews, contract line crews and tree crews ready to respond to outages. System Operations and the company’s local call center were staffed as well. The fast-moving storm arrived in Marion County at 2:30 a.m. and traveled southeast through SECO’s service territory. The storm cleared the area around 6:30 a.m.

The outages were mostly small, isolated incidents involving downed trees and poles. Marion, Sumter and Citrus Counties were hardest hit, causing almost 1,500 members to lose power overnight. As of 7:30 a.m., crews are working to restore power to 254 members who remain without power. Crews are still out in full-force working the remaining outages, which should be restored by noon on Thursday.

John LaSelva, SECO’s Vice President of Operations, stated, “SECO’s well-designed, solidly-constructed system continues to perform well during storms. We continuously inspect, upgrade and conduct maintenance on our system to better serve our members. A well-maintained system with a comprehensive vegetation management program means less outages for members, and when storms hit, it makes for a shorter restoration time.”

Atlantic Hurricane Season begins June 1. Learn more about SECO’s storm readiness by visiting SECO’s Reliability page. “Like” SECO’s Facebook page and “follow” @SECOEnergy on Twitter for news releases and cooperative updates about SECO’s new Storm Center platform that is scheduled for launch this summer. The new system will include text, email and phone outage notification options.